Not to be confused with 2015 Jennifer Lawrence movie, Joy on Netflix is a new 2024 movie starring Thomasin McKenzie that offers a crash course on the history of in vitro fertilization, or IVF.
Directed by Ben Taylor, with a screenplay by Jack Thorne, Joy—which began streaming on Netflix today—takes viewers back to England in the ’60s and ’70s, when a team of two doctors and a nurse were working tirelessly to help solve the problem of infertility. Starring Bill Nighy, Thomasin McKenzie, and James Norton, Joy is both an entertaining and educational watch. I know I learned a lot about the history of IVF.
But this is still a Hollywood movie, and we know Hollywood movies sometimes take liberties with the facts. Read on to learn more about the Joy true story, IVF, and Thomasin McKenzie’s character, Jean Purdy.
The Netflix movie Joy is based on the true story of the invention of in vitro fertilization (IVF). The first-ever IVF baby, Louise Joy Brown, was born on July 15, 1978, thanks to the work of an English obstetrician and surgeon Patrick Steptoe (played by Bill Nighy), an English scientist Robert Edwards (played by James Norton), and nurse, lab assistant, and embryologist Jean Purdy (played by Thomasin McKenzie).
Jean Marian Purdy was an English nurse who was credited by Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards—the latter of whom won the Nobel Peace Prize for his innovation in IVF—as essential to the process of creating the first-ever IVF baby. Though an effort has been made in recent years to highlight her vital contribution, at the time she was largely forgotten, in favor of credit being bestowed solely on Steptoe and Edwards.
In 2019, The Guardian reported Edwards (who died in 2013) sent a letter to the hospital where the first IVF baby was created, to protest the exclusion of Purdy’s name from a hospital plaque. “I feel strongly about the inclusion of the names of the people who helped with the conception of Louise Brown,” Edwards wrote. “I feel this especially about Jean Purdy, who travelled to Oldham with me for 10 years, and contributed as much as I did to the project. Indeed, I regard her as an equal contributor to Patrick Steptoe and myself.”
Purdy began working with Edwards at Physiological Laboratory in Cambridge, in 1968. According to the same Guardian feature, she was the first witness of the successful cell division of the embryo that would go on to become the first IVF baby, Louise Joy Brown. She was reportedly so important to the work that when Purdy had to take off time to care for her sick mother, the entire IVF research project was put on pause.
Purdy died young, at the age of 39 in 1985, from complications with skin cancer.
Like most Hollywood movies based on a true story, some things were changed from the true story for the movie, in order to make a more efficient and compelling movie. The actual conversations that Purdy had both with the doctors and with their patients are not known, and thus were invented for the movie.
Additionally, much of what you see about Jean’s personal life in the movie—her connection to the church, her personal drama with her mother—was made up. This is because Purdy’s private life was not very well documented, and she has no close relatives still living.
In an interview for the Joy production notes, producer Rachel Mason (who also has a “story by” credit on the film, and is married to screenwriter Jack Thorne) said, “It was incredibly frustrating to have so much less information about Jean. We would have loved to uncover more, but piecing together the story of her life was a deeply fascinating endeavour.”
That said, Thorne and his team did a lot of research to try make their depiction of early IVF as close to the truth as possible. The real Purdy, Edwards and Steptoe co-founded the first-ever IVF clinic, Bourn Hall, in 1980, and the clinic still exists today, and even has some of the original workers still on site. Mason and Thorne interviewed those workers, as well as many of the actual women who participated in the early IVF treatment trials, who referred to themselves as “The Ovum Club.” They also spoke to the living relatives of Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe.
“Talking to members of The Ovum Club, as well as Bob’s daughters and Patrick’s son, was a profoundly moving experience,” Thorne said in an interview for the Joy production notes. “It was wonderful to hear their stories and then discuss them with Rachel.”
One scene that was faithfully recreated was the birth of baby Louise Joy Brown. Because footage of that real birth exists, Thorne integrated real clips from the real birth in the film. Production designer Alice Normington was able to recreate that hospital room, though she made a few tweaks.
“I chose to use elements that were both true to the story and visually engaging,” Normington said in an interview for the Joy production notes. “For the birthing scene, I used yellow tiles to evoke feelings of sunshine and happiness, reflecting the film’s themes of joy and hope.”
As for the actors, they all learned a lot about the real process of IVF. “The science was undeniably fascinating,” said Norton, who plays Robert Edwards in the movie. “But what struck me equally was the atmosphere of the unit – the palpable hope and the profound highs and lows that the nurses and doctors navigate daily. It was an eye-opening experience.”